Justicia brandegeana, the shrimp plant, is a subtropical evergreen shrub from Mexico, grown the world over for the curious, shrimp-like flower spikes that give the plant its name: arching, overlapping bracts in warm coppery orange, salmon, and rust, from which small white flowers peek like a shrimp's legs. The bracts hold their color for weeks, so a well-grown plant seems always in bloom.
The shrimp plant earns the name honestly. The arching flower spikes are built of overlapping bronze-to-pink bracts, each one curved and shingled over the next, so that the whole drooping cluster reads unmistakably as the tail of a boiled shrimp. This is the soft pink form, gentler in color than the coppery-salmon type most people picture, and out of the bracts slip the true flowers: slender, white, two-lipped tubes freckled with maroon at the throat.
Mexican honeysuckle is neither a honeysuckle nor a vine but a soft, much-branched shrub of the acanthus family, native from Mexico through Central America to northwestern Colombia and out into the Bahamas and Hispaniola. The common name comes from the flowers: narrow tubes of glowing orange, an inch or more long, carried in loose clusters at the ends of the stems over velvety, grass-green leaves. In frost-free country the plant blooms nearly year-round; in a Southern garden, expect a long show from late spring until frost, with hummingbirds working the flowers from the first tube to the last.
